S-Net for multi-memory multicores

Copyright ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Declarative Aspects of Multicore Programming: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1708046.1708054S-Net is a declarative coordination language and component technology aimed at modern multi-core/many-core architectures and systems-on-chip. It builds on the concept of stream processing to structure dynamically evolving networks of communicating asynchronous components. Components themselves are implemented using a conventional language suitable for the application domain. This two-level software architecture maintains a familiar sequential development environment for large parts of an application and offers a high-level declarative approach to component coordination. In this paper we present a conservative language extension for the placement of components and component networks in a multi-memory environment, i.e. architectures that associate individual compute cores or groups thereof with private memories. We describe a novel distributed runtime system layer that complements our existing multithreaded runtime system for shared memory multicores. Particular emphasis is put on efficient management of data communication. Last not least, we present preliminary experimental data

S+Net: extending functional coordination with extra-functional semantics

This technical report introduces S+Net, a compositional coordination language for streaming networks with extra-functional semantics. Compositionality simplifies the specification of complex parallel and distributed applications; extra-functional semantics allow the application designer to reason about and control resource usage, performance and fault handling. The key feature of S+Net is that functional and extra-functional semantics are defined orthogonally from each other. S+Net can be seen as a simultaneous simplification and extension of the existing coordination language S-Net, that gives control of extra-functional behavior to the S-Net programmer. S+Net can also be seen as a transitional research step between S-Net and AstraKahn, another coordination language currently being designed at the University of Hertfordshire. In contrast with AstraKahn which constitutes a re-design from the ground up, S+Net preserves the basic operational semantics of S-Net and thus provides an incremental introduction of extra-functional control in an existing language.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

A Case Study in Coordination Programming: Performance Evaluation of S-Net vs Intel's Concurrent Collections

We present a programming methodology and runtime performance case study comparing the declarative data flow coordination language S-Net with Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC). As a coordination language S-Net achieves a near-complete separation of concerns between sequential software components implemented in a separate algorithmic language and their parallel orchestration in an asynchronous data flow streaming network. We investigate the merits of S-Net and CnC with the help of a relevant and non-trivial linear algebra problem: tiled Cholesky decomposition. We describe two alternative S-Net implementations of tiled Cholesky factorization and compare them with two CnC implementations, one with explicit performance tuning and one without, that have previously been used to illustrate Intel CnC. Our experiments on a 48-core machine demonstrate that S-Net manages to outperform CnC on this problem.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for PLC 2014 worksho

Die Konstruktion einer marktbasierten Benchmark für Beteiligungstitel in Schiffsinvestitionen

Schiffsinvestitionen haben in Deutschland eine lange Tradition und stellen für private Anleger — meist über geschlossene Fonds — und zunehmend auch für institutionelle Anleger eine bedeutende Form der Kapitalanlage dar. Trotz ihrer schon lange anhaltenden Beliebtheit und des hohen Anlagevolumens gibt es keine belastbaren Daten über die Ertrags- und Risikoeigenschaften von Beteiligungstiteln in Schiffsinvestitionen. In diesem Aufsatz wird ein Indexkonzept als Benchmark für solche Beteiligungstitel entwickelt. Es ermöglicht das Berechnen langer (Start 1997), repräsentativer, marktbasierter Index- und damit auch Renditezeitreihen für Schiffsinvestitionen. Die Frequenz ist mit monatlichen Daten ausreichend hoch für statistische Auswertungen. Das Indexkonzept verbessert die Transparenz des gesamten Schifffahrtssegments ganz erheblich. Über das Segment hinaus erlauben die Indizes die Einbindung von Schiffsinvestitionen in quantitative Gesamtportfolioüberlegungen. Die ersten Berechnungen haben eher exemplarischen Charakter. Sie geben Anhaltspunkte hinsichtlich der Ertrags-Risiko-Kombinationen und der Diversifikationseigenschaften von Schiffsinvestitionen sowie der Verteilungseigenschaften der Indexzeitreihen.Investments in shipping have a long tradition in Germany. They are a significant form of investment for private investors - mainly through KG funds - and became increasingly relevant for institutional investors. Despite its long term lasting popularity and the high investment volume there are no relevant data available regarding risk and return of participations in shipping investments. This article develops an index concept as a benchmark for such participations. It enables the calculation of long term (since 1997), representative, market based index time series and with it also return time series for shipping investments. With the availability of monthly data the frequency is high enough for statistical evaluations. The index concept improves the transparency of the whole shipping segment considerably. Furthermore the indexes allow the integration of shipping investments in quantitative portfolio considerations. The first calculations in this article can be seen as exemplary. They provide clues regarding risk return combinations and with respect to diversification properties of shipping investments as well as characteristics about index times series distributions

Investing in times of inflation fears: Diversification properties of investments in liquid real assets

The financial crisis and the rescue measures taken by governments and central banks increased investors' interest in liquidity and in real assets supposed to offer a hedge against inflation. Against this background, we investigate empirically four real assets (real estate, commodities, infrastructure, and shipping) for which there are investment instruments available which trade in liquid markets. Our empirical study using data from 1999 to 2009 yields several results: First, in most cases, the addition of real assets improved portfolio performance (measured with Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, Omega ratio, and Modified Sharpe ratio) in comparison with a base portfolio consisting only of standard stocks and bonds. Among the four real assets, infrastructure and shipping clearly outperformed commodities and real estate. Second, the time frame chosen for the analysis matters very much. This is bad news for investors because there is no such thing as the single 'true' time frame for this purpose. Due to our analytical approach, we regard our conclusions, in spite of their general time dependence, as rather solid. Third, despite great conceptual differences, our four performance measures lead to the same conclusions. This result is interesting for investors beyond our specific setting because the selection of a specific performance measure from the vast supply of such measures does not seem to matter much. --diversification,inflation,portfolio choice,investments in real assets

Compiling vector pascal to the XeonPhi

Intel's XeonPhi is a highly parallel x86 architecture chip made by Intel. It has a number of novel features which make it a particularly challenging target for the compiler writer. This paper describes the techniques used to port the Glasgow Vector Pascal Compiler to this architecture and assess its performance by comparisons of the XeonPhi with 3 other machines running the same algorithms

Die Konstruktion einer marktbasierten Benchmark für Beteiligungstitel in Schiffsinvestitionen

Schiffsinvestitionen haben in Deutschland eine lange Tradition und stellen für private Anleger — meist über geschlossene Fonds — und zunehmend auch für institutionelle Anleger eine bedeutende Form der Kapitalanlage dar. Trotz ihrer schon lange anhaltenden Beliebtheit und des hohen Anlagevolumens gibt es keine belastbaren Daten über die Ertrags- und Risikoeigenschaften von Beteiligungstiteln in Schiffsinvestitionen. In diesem Aufsatz wird ein Indexkonzept als Benchmark für solche Beteiligungstitel entwickelt. Es ermöglicht das Berechnen langer (Start 1997), repräsentativer, marktbasierter Index- und damit auch Renditezeitreihen für Schiffsinvestitionen. Die Frequenz ist mit monatlichen Daten ausreichend hoch für statistische Auswertungen. Das Indexkonzept verbessert die Transparenz des gesamten Schifffahrtssegments ganz erheblich. Über das Segment hinaus erlauben die Indizes die Einbindung von Schiffsinvestitionen in quantitative Gesamtportfolioüberlegungen. Die ersten Berechnungen haben eher exemplarischen Charakter. Sie geben Anhaltspunkte hinsichtlich der Ertrags-Risiko-Kombinationen und der Diversifikationseigenschaften von Schiffsinvestitionen sowie der Verteilungseigenschaften der Indexzeitreihen. -- Investments in shipping have a long tradition in Germany. They are a significant form of investment for private investors - mainly through KG funds - and became increasingly relevant for institutional investors. Despite its long term lasting popularity and the high investment volume there are no relevant data available regarding risk and return of participations in shipping investments. This article develops an index concept as a benchmark for such participations. It enables the calculation of long term (since 1997), representative, market based index time series and with it also return time series for shipping investments. With the availability of monthly data the frequency is high enough for statistical evaluations. The index concept improves the transparency of the whole shipping segment considerably. Furthermore the indexes allow the integration of shipping investments in quantitative portfolio considerations. The first calculations in this article can be seen as exemplary. They provide clues regarding risk return combinations and with respect to diversification properties of shipping investments as well as characteristics about index times series distributions.investments in shipping,losed funds in shipping (KG funds),total return index,Schiffsinvestitionen,geschlossene Schiffsfonds,Performanceindex

The Cost and Benefits of Coordination Programming: Two Case Studies in Concurrent Collection and S-Net

Electronic version of an article published as Pavel Zaichenkov et al, Parallel Processing Letters, Vol. 26 (3), 2016, 24 pages. DOI: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0129626416500110 © 2016 World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/pplThis is an evaluation study of the expressiveness provided and the performance delivered by the coordination language S-NET in comparison to Intel’s Concurrent Collections (CnC). An S-NET application is a network of black-box compute components connected through anonymous data streams, with the standard input and output streams linking the application to the environment. Our case study is based on two applications: a face detection algorithm implemented as a pipeline of feature classifiers and a numerical algorithm from the linear algebra domain, namely Cholesky decomposition. The selected applications are representative and have been selected by Intel researchers as evaluation testbeds for CnC in the past. We implement various versions of both algorithms in S-NET and compare them with equivalent CnC implementations, both with and without tuning, previously published by the CnC community. Our experiments on a large-scale server system demonstrate that S-Net delivers very similar scalability and absolute performance on the studied examples as tuned CnC codes do, even without specific tuning. At the same time, S-Net does achieve a much more complete separation of concerns between compute and coordination layers than CnC even intends to.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio